To get a better understanding how content marketing and SEO can be used to increase sales and leads, it always helps to take a look at how other people are achieving these goals. In the content outlined below, you’ll find a case study that highlights the success UAV Coach found by implementing content marketing and SEO best practices.

Who Is UAV Coach?

UAV Coach is an entity that operates in the commercial drone space industry. The company provides valuable resources on its website, including online training that helps people pass the United States Drone Certification test. 99 percent of the people who take advantage of UAV Coach’s online training courses pass the test on their first try.

Background of the Case Study

UAV Coach was founded by Alan Perlman, who had great aspirations to build a company around something he’s truly about. He knew from the beginning that in order to accomplish this goal, he needed a way to generate recurring traffic to his website as well as a method for garnering leads.

To help him generate traffic and secure leads, he reached out to Robbie Richards, a reputable professional who specializes in actionable online marketing strategies. Robbie and Alan both agreed that they needed to develop a precise SEO strategy that focused on evergreen content. This would not only position UAV Coach an authority in the industry, but it would produce long-term exposure. When you combine long-term exposure with authority, this results in the ability to capture leads and convert them into actual customers.

To kick off the publishing of evergreen content, Robbie and Alan created a 4,400-word piece of content that served as a guide for piloting a quadcopter with a remote control. If you Google “how to fly a quadcopter,” the article sits in the #1 spot. It also has earned high rankings for several other long-tail versions of this keyword.

Understanding Keyword Rankings and Search Volume

There are only 720 online searches for “how to fly a quadcopter” each month and only 880 for “how to fly a drone.” There are about 50 monthly searches for “how to fly a quadcopter in a circle.” The search volume for the keyword “quadcopter,” however, is 74,000.

Each of these search terms generates tons of visitors to the UAV Coach website each day. In fact, during the first six months after the post was published, 21.4 percent of web traffic coming to the UAV Coach site was brought in by this article. And because of the extensive length of the article, the average time on page was five minutes and 22 seconds. This proves that long-form content increases visitors’ average time on page.

And not only does it improve average time on page, but because the content is so in-depth, it led to the post capturing 2,335 emails; this positioned the post itself as one of the top four lead generators for UAV Coach.

It should be noted that this post didn’t hit the number one spot overnight. This is why it is so important to be patient with SEO marketing. The post took three months to land on the first page and two more months to reach the #1 spot. Once the post had been published for six months, it had generated more than 20,300 page views.

Alan admits that even though he had worked with hundreds of companies regarding marketing strategies, it wasn’t until he published such an in-depth posting and used correct SEO techniques that he was able to achieve such remarkable results. More so, he says that this single posting has helped him extensively grow his email list, and even better is that it has increased revenue for his business through his affiliate partners. In a sense, he turned an industry blog into a flourishing business.

What Were the SEO Techniques That Were Used to Create Such a Successful Blog Posting?

The SEO techniques used to create such a successful blog posting can be used in any niche. The key to the blog posting’s success was targeting keywords that had less competition. These keywords were easier to rank for and can be referred to as untapped keywords.

During the creation of the blog post, six steps were followed the produced amazing results:

Keywords were researched and competitive analyses were performed

Content was produced

On-page SEO tactics were implemented

List building strategies were incorporated

The content was promoted

Link building practices were used

Effective keyword research is performed by checking for the monthly search volume of keywords that are relevant to your niche. From here, you need to center your content around the keywords that are less competitive. Next, you need to assess your competitors for the keywords they are using and integrate the ones they are missing in your content.

When Robbie and Alan performed competitive analyses, they made sure to check and see if their competitors were using exact match keywords. They looked for these exact matches in the:

Title

Alt text

URL

Heading tags

They then incorporated less competitive keywords into all of these elements. This played a major role in getting the blog posting to land in the #1 spot on Google and other search engines.

During the content creation phase of the blog posting, creating the best content on the topic being discussed was a primary goal. They knew they needed to provide value and not fluff. They also knew that having valuable content would entice readers to share the content. More importantly, it would help them secure backlinks from reputable websites.

To create such a powerful and valuable 4,400-word piece of content, it took Robbie an entire three days to complete his research. He included as much detail as he could while writing out what he had researched. This resulted in a piece of content that was far more in-depth than anything else available on the web.

The ultimate priority when creating and publishing the content was to build an email list. Those subscribing to the list were deemed as leads and it became much easier to target them with content that eventually converted many of them into actual customers; this boosted sales revenue.

The Takeaway

The UAV Coach case study clearly highlights the importance of creating long-form content with targeted non-competitive keywords for your readers. It will not only help you acquire higher rankings from search engines but it can help generate leads by building your email list. Once you have captured these leads, it is then up to you to continue pushing them further down the sales funnel by targeting them with even more valuable content.